Music, dance, IT, trivia. Not necessarily in that order.

IT tips #2: Get rid of text-wrap when copying and pasting into Word

Most people know about search and replace, but fewer know that you can search & replace weird stuff like paragraph marks. This is a life-saver if you want to get rid of fixed line-breaks in text that you’ve copied and pasted into Word. It happens a lot with emails, but also with text copied from pdfs – resulting in a 25 page document that could easily be unwrapped into 4 pages. You can’t see the paragraph marks unless you press the ‘show non-printing characters’ button (see left), but if you’ve got lines that won’t unwrap, they’re probably to blame.

Tip: If you’re faced with a load of annoying paragraph breaks on every line of pasted text

Go to Edit>Replace (or Press Ctrl+H/Mac: ⌃⌘+H)

Select the advanced options

Press the ‘special’ menu button (see image below)

Select ‘Paragraph Mark’

This will put the sign for ^p in the ‘Find’ box

In the ‘Replace’ box, press Spacebar once (i.e. so you’re replacing the paragraph mark with a space)†

Select ‘replace all’

And there you are – all back into normal text again. You can of course just type ^p instead of selecting the special menu – but it’s worth seeing what else you can search for to replace.

With emails, once you’ve done this, you may still need to get rid of the chevrons (>) that sometimes get put on the beginning of every line of quoted text.

Go to Edit>Replace

Type > in the ‘Find’ box

In the ‘replace’ box, press Spacebar once – i.e. you’re going to replace each > with a space

It makes sense to add a space, so I’m wondering why I (deliberately – I remember) left that step out. I think I must have had a case where the deletion of a paragraph mark resulted in a space anyway, but that doesn’t sound right.

Welcome to my new site

A blog about music, IT and dance some of the time, and eclectic personal trivia the rest of the time. I've moved here from www.jsmusic.org.uk, where the software was beginning to fall over, but don't worry, all the old stuff is still there if you're looking for it.
If you're another academic music/dance type, you might be interested in the conferences page, where I list conferences/seminars that I think I might go to (see under 'Pages you might like')